A Site Whose Riches Bob on the Surface

By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL

Published: August 9, 2001

THE white patchwork that greets visitors to ''HistoryWired,'' a new museum exhibition on the Web, might be likened to an aerial view of cornfields after a winter snow. But this is not Kansas. Instead, each of the grid's blank rectangles provides access to one of the 450 items in the virtual exhibition, including the scarecrow's costume from ''The Wizard of Oz.''

Indeed, to grasp the breadth of the site, which went online last week at historywired .si.edu, one need only skim its surface. Moving the cursor across the grid reveals the name of object after object, all of them part of the collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

Clicking on a rectangle leads to a Web page with a photograph of the object, a curator's description of its significance, links to relevant articles and sometimes a Smithsonian Folkways audio clip. Neighboring blocks share general themes like ''arts/ entertainment'': the ''Oz'' costume, for example, is next to the television marionette Howdy Doody.

''HistoryWired: A Few of Our Favorite Things'' is one of a handful of projects, among them I.B.M.'s ''glass engine,'' that are striving to produce alternatives to conventional methods for retrieving online information. Neither the museum's Web project nor I.B.M.'s is purely a search engine or an interface. Instead, they are innovative tools meant to encourage exploration itself.

''For me,'' said Judith Gradwohl, director of the history museum's Web program, ''one of the most important experiences in a museum is serendipity -- when I'm lost and end up in an exhibit I didn't intend to see and it turns out to be really interesting.'' To that end, she said, ''HistoryWired'' is designed ''to help people find things they didn't know they were looking for.''

Few sites have such a navigational brain. Digital information is often arranged in a hierarchical structure, with files that branch into ever more specific subcategories. To arrive at a desired Web page often involves drilling down through the data until it dead-ends. ''Every time you make a decision,'' Ms. Gradwohl said, ''it narrows your focus to the point that you have no choice.''

Instead, ''HistoryWired'' furnishes access to all of its data on the site's top level. From there, the site can be explored in a variety of ways. Clicking on buttons marked with broader themes like ''tech'' and ''arts'' turns the relevant squares orange. If both buttons are pushed, the squares darken for entries where the themes overlap, like the first Technicolor film camera.

Slider bars on a historical time line at the top of the page can narrow or expand the selection of objects. Visitors can vote for their favorites, and the size and position of the rectangles will change accordingly over time to guide visitors who only want to view the most popular entries.

Bruce Tognazzini, publisher of AskTog (asktog.com), a site about interaction between humans and computers, said that ''HistoryWired'' contrasted with conventional Web offerings in which the pages are visually distinctive but the navigation is invisible. ''Here, the navigation is presented in rich graphical detail, but the content objects are faceless white boxes,'' he said.

''HistoryWired'' was adapted by Martin Wattenberg from his Map of the Market, a tool for tracking the performance of more than 500 stocks at the SmartMoney Web site (www.smartmoney.com), where he is research director.

The museum site is even more kinetic, with the smallest movement of the mouse yielding an immediate on-screen response in a bright yellow box, partly to counter the impression that nothing is there. ''There's no doubt that when the first thing you see is a blank screen, there's a little bit of existential despair,'' Mr. Wattenberg said.

The landscape for the glass engine, developed by Mark Podlaseck at I.B.M.'s research center in Hawthorne, N.Y., is as flat as the museum site's, but to distinctly different effect. The project began after the composer Philip Glass approached Mr. Podlaseck about developing a database that would allow people interested in licensing his music to search for the most suitable choice.

Mr. Podlaseck started pondering how someone could conduct a search if he did not know what he was looking for, or did know what he was seeking but lacked the words to describe it. His solution was inspired by vintage radio dials, which did not label stations' frequencies but essentially informed a listener that he had arrived at his destination when he heard what he wanted.

At the project's test site, www.philipglass .com/glassengine, Mr. Glass's music begins to play as horizontal bars, representing variables like date, track number and mood, pass over a vertical line running down the center of the page. Again, access to the entire database -- which includes excerpts from 500 CD tracks -- is on the site's top level. Moving a chronology bar to 1995 might yield Glass's Third String Quartet.

A revised version of the site will be online this fall. Mr. Podlaseck said that a more visually oriented version of the glass engine might also be used for an Egyptian cultural site that would be sponsored by I.B.M.

Mr. Tognazzini said that neither of the two projects' tableaus would work as well for larger amounts of information, and he has some reservations about their functionality. But he said he could foresee their being adapted for applications like real estate and television listings. ''It is a great first step,'' he said. ''I expect a lot more can be done in the future.''

Someday, over the rainbow?

Photo: NO DIGGING REQUIRED -- The opening page of the National Museum of American History's ''HistoryWired'' show aims to give visitors a serendipitous browsing experience.